Learning Contact-based Navigation in Crowds
Navigation strategies that intentionally incorporate contact with humans (i.e. "contact-based" social navigation) in crowded environments are largely unexplored even though collision-free social navigation is a well studied problem. Traditional social navigation frameworks require the robot to stop suddenly or "freeze" whenever a collision is imminent. This paradigm poses two problems: 1) freezing while navigating a crowd may cause people to trip and fall over the robot, resulting in more harm than the collision itself, and 2) in very dense social environments where collisions are unavoidable, such a control scheme would render the robot unable to move and preclude the opportunity to study how humans incorporate robots into these environments. However, if robots are to be meaningfully included in crowded social spaces, such as busy streets, subways, stores, or other densely populated locales, there may not exist trajectories that can guarantee zero collisions. Thus, adoption of robots in these environments requires the development of minimally disruptive navigation plans that can safely plan for and respond to contacts. We propose a learning-based motion planner and control scheme to navigate dense social environments using safe contacts for an omnidirectional mobile robot. The planner is evaluated in simulation over 360 trials with crowd densities varying between 0.0 and 1.6 people per square meter. Our navigation scheme is able to use contact to safely navigate in crowds of higher density than has been previously reported, to our knowledge.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
NavigateSocial NavigationSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Pedestrian-Robot Interactions on Autonomous Crowd Navigation: Reactive Control Methods and Evaluation Metrics
Autonomous navigation in highly populated areas remains a challenging task for robots because of the difficulty in guaranteeing safe interactions with pedestrians in unstructured situations. In this work, we present a cr…
Autonomous NavigationLiDAR-based Crowd Navigation with Visible Edge Group Representation
Robot navigation in crowded pedestrian environments is a well-known challenge and we explore the practical deployment of group-based representations in this setting. Pedestrian groups have been empirically shown to enabl…
Robot NavigationDirect Contact-Tolerant Motion Planning With Vision Language Models
Navigation in cluttered environments often requires robots to tolerate contact with movable or deformable objects to maintain efficiency. Existing contact-tolerant motion planning (CTMP) methods rely on indirect spatial …
Motion PlanningContact-Aided Navigation of Flexible Robotic Endoscope Using Deep Reinforcement Learning in Dynamic Stomach
Navigating a flexible robotic endoscope (FRE) through the gastrointestinal tract is critical for surgical diagnosis and treatment. However, navigation in the dynamic stomach is particularly challenging because the FRE mu…
Reinforcement LearningDecentralized Structural-RNN for Robot Crowd Navigation with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Safe and efficient navigation through human crowds is an essential capability for mobile robots. Previous work on robot crowd navigation assumes that the dynamics of all agents are known and well-defined. In addition, th…
Deep Reinforcement LearningMotion Planningreinforcement-learningReinforcement Learning (RL)+2